Apollo 13

When they stepped out of the recovery helicopter onto the deck of the U.S.S. Iwo Jima
the crew were wearing blue jumpsuits with an embroidered mission patch attached.

The patches can be seen quite distinctly in these photos.

The images on the right (detail from color photos of the crew on board the Iwo Jima from the LIFE magazine archives)
clearly show the embroidered patch.

The same design is visible on the jump suits of the crew in all photos taken on the Iwo Jima and again in photos
of the crew receiving medals from President Nixon on their arrival in Hawaii.

This patch is the one recognized today as the Apollo 13 Crew Patch.

It seems that this patch was manufactured by AB Emblem, since examples have been seen in original KSC packaging and
also seen in some sets of vintage AB patches. Since the more common AB design exists in bare back form this implies that AB
changed their design sometime before the switch to coated backs in the late 70s. In fact, given the relative scarcity of this design
I would assume that the change was made not long after the flight itself. Why AB Emblem should have changed the design of their Apollo 13
patch and no other is a mystery.

In any case, despite the fact that the patch as apprently available commercially to at least some extent it
is still scarce enough to qualify as a Crew Patch.

The Crew Patch

Patch id:

The Crew Patch

Worn by crew?

Yes. This was the design
worn by the crew on their post-flight jump suits.

Flown?

Yes. Examples of this patch were
carried on the flight as souvenirs[1].

Manufacturer:

AB Emblem

Distribution:

Supplied to NASA but apparently
also available commerically for a limited time.

The standard AB Emblem patch is very different to the design worn by the crew, with multi-colored horses and no craters on the lunar surface.
It exists in two main variants, one embroidered on a black velvety background (as shown above) and the other on
black twill. The velvet version appears to be slightly more common than the twill version, at a ratio of roughly 2 to 1.

The Lion Brothers Apollo 13 patch is similar to the crew version but the colors are subtly different. The sun's rays are also longer to the upper right.
It also has the number "13" embroidered in palee thread in the mane of the horse on the left as a hallmark.

Even more scarce is a
'gold' version
of the patch with gold thread replacing both the orange thread normally used for the sun
and the silver thread normally used for the border and the horses' manes. This patch has a bare cloth back. I've only
seen one example, so this may just have been a one-off experiment.

A set of patches flown by Jack Swigert on Apollo 13 that came to auction in 2014 included 5 examples of the AB Emblem patch
all of which are a distinct color variant which I refer to as the 'dark horse' variant.

This variant of the velvet background AB Emblem patch is defined by two color changes. The right-hand horse is executed in a darker shade of brown than in the other variants, but the most visible change is the thread color used for the body of the central horse, the mane of the right-hand horse, shading in the mane of the left-hand horse, and on the contintents of the Earth. Instead of a pale beige color, in this variant the thread is the much darker orange-brown color usually used for the right-hand horse.

As a recent 'discovery' it's difficult to be sure how uncommon this variant actually is,
but a random sample of 11 vintage AB Emblem Apollo 13 patches did not include any examples.

[AS13UNK2]

A rather crude bare backed patch of unknown origin. The only example seen to-date had been sewn to clothing and
distorted by washing.
It seems likely that this is actually a modern 'tiger embroidery' patch from the Phillipines, produced
by hand on a machine by someone following a pattern. Each patch produced this way is different, as
shown by the UNK4/6/7 examples below.

This patch was offered to readers of Look-in magazine
and Countdown magazine in the UK in 1972, and was part of a set manufactured by Space Spin-Off Ltd.
The design appears to be based on the AB Emblem patch, but executed on thin black cloth (not twill) with a cut edge.

Patch id:

[AS13UNK7]

As with AS13UNK2, AS13UNK4, and ASK13UNK6 above, this is likely a modern 'tiger embroidery' patch produced in the Phillipines
by someone using a sewing machine to trace a pattern. Each patch produced this way will be distinctly different from the others,
with the lettering in particular being very irregular.